(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sign language public addressing and emergency system for the hearing impaired and others.
(2) Prior Art
Our society has both hearing and deaf persons. Hearing persons use a spoken language such as English, while the deaf use a visual language, e.g., sign language.
Sign language, including American sign language, is a comprehensive and distinct language in which manual gestures, body positions, body posture, arm movement, hand and finger positions, facial expressions involving eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, lips and mouth movements, are used in certain specific combinations to convey meaning. Sign language is not a form of manually coded English. Sign language has its own syntax and grammatical structure. Text cannot convey sign language.
Static pictures cannot convey sign language, since sign language is a language of expressions and movements.
Finger spelling cannot convey sign language. Finger spelling is used to spell words that cannot be signed in sign language and for names. It is the equivalent of English text letters only. Note that numbers cannot be finger spelled since they require proper movement to define their numerical meaning. Time, money and dates all have different movements. A word such as “big” used in a sentence such as “a big fire” needs to be defined as to how “big” is big by the amount of expression given.
Currently, there are public addressing systems that address the public by voice and text. However, there is no public addressing system that addresses deaf persons in sign language.